Solutions to the 2020 Hunt

Opening

Puzzle 1

This is the puzzle. Puzzle One. Solve it.

This was a simple game of connect the dots. Following the dots in ascending order spelled out the word "WINNER"

After submitting the answer, the website displayed: "Congratulations!!! You are winner #43,487. You have much to be proud of! We hope you enjoyed this year's hunt as much as we enjoyed making it. We weren't sure if we were gonna be able to pull off a full hunt this year given the global pandemic taking place, but we did it! Congratulations once again on your Victorious Triumph. We will be in contact with you about your prize via email within 10 to 10,000 minutes."

The website was then no longer interactive, but soon Hunters received an email from Benn Simon telling them the hunt wasn’t over, and that the rest of the puzzles were hidden.

Following the provided link brought the Hunters back and opened the rest of the puzzles.

1820-1872 Poem

Coming back to the main puzzles page, Hunters were greeted with a new interface along with a riddle:

A poem for the seeker, a location for the key
Click me on the map, here’s what you need to see:

My age is old as dirt, you're sure to find some here
After all, it’s how we made our livings year to year

Plantation life is hard, and full of endless strife
Just ploughing and Smithing, and not much nightlife

Revolutions and war, these storied walls have seen
Would you have ever known it, amidst these fields of green

This riddle pointed Hunters to the Smithfield Plantation just southwest of the life science buildings and parking lots. Clicking on it in the map view in the bottom corner unlocked the next three puzzles.

Blocks

The first puzzle to appear in the timeline was from 1830:

The upper six squares are arranged so they can be folded into a cube with different colors on all six faces. Doing so and aligning them with the blocks shown would give you this:
The front facing squares all showed different Pigpen Cipher letters, and spelling them out gave the answer "BEGGAR"

Sixteen Squares

The second puzzle to appear in the timeline was from 1856:

Each of the five locations is a real location in the Historic 16 Squares in downtown Blacksburg. Mapping these places to the different locations would give you the letter in that square from the diamond above; Market Square Park gave you the letter "O". Spelling these out in number order gave the answer "ROYAL"

Lorem Ipsum

The third puzzle to appear in the timeline and the last puzzle to appear in the first stage was from 1869:

The passage is an almost-match to the typical Lorem Ipsum passage used for placeholder text in documents, but comparing it to the original shows inserted words. These new additions are in pig latin, and translating them as they appear in the passage gives the phrase: "You found my message clear as day but who wrote this passage they are your way." Looking up who originally wrote Lorem Ipsum, the final answer was "CICERO"

1872-1896 Poem

Coming back to the main puzzles page, Hunters were greeted with a new riddle:

A poem for the seeker, a location left alone
Click me on the map, here’s what needs to be shown:

My purpose was quite cool, my methods rather slick
People came to me for assistance rather than a drink

A little brother is how I’m seen, it’s actually pretty rude
A smaller little offshoot, less weathered and more crude

I have some steps that go together if you let them flow
Hop on over, find my face, its surface let ice grow

This poem was in reference to the Ice Pond, the smaller offshoot to the northwest of the Duck Pond.

Course Catalog

The fourth puzzle to appear in the timeline and the first puzzle to appear in the second stage was from 1872:

March

The seven drills demonstrated correlated to a letter, spelled out by the path they march in. A left and right step counted as two steps forward (emulating walking forward), two left steps marked turning 90 degrees left, and two right steps marked turning 90 degrees right. The steps out marked the start of each move forward. All the stated commands preempted the direction changes ("RIGHT" occured one beat before the command started), and each successive drill had to be started at the ending position of the previous one.

Here’s an example: Drill #1 has 8 steps forward, a turn 90 degrees left, 4 steps forward, a turn 90 degrees left, 4 steps forward, a turn 90 degrees left, 4 steps forward, a turn 90 degrees left, 4 steps forward, and a turn 90 degrees left. Doing all of this would leave you with "b" spelled out, with the marcher facing east at the last step. You would then start marking out Drill #2 facing east from the last position in Drill #1. Following this pattern left you with the following pattern--the colors correlate to the drills.
Drill 6 did have a bit of a slip in placing the 2nd right turn, which could’ve caused some confusion. But once lain out and double checked with the audio markings, the final answer is "BLUNDER"

Lecture

While watching the lecture, the speaker indicates that there will be an attendance question. At 2:27, the attendance question asks "How old was Rekam when he tested his first puzzle hunt?" and the given answer is "FIVE"

Midterm

The seventh puzzle to appear in the timeline and the last puzzle to appear in the second stage was from 1892:

All answers to The Midterm crossword puzzle are given throughout the Lecture puzzle video. The completed crossword is as follows:
Combine the letters in the red numbered squares in ascending order to get REKAM IS OLD BUT WHAT CAME BEFORE UM. Returning to the Lecture video, pay attention to when the speakers say "UM" and take note of the word that was said directly before "UM". Collecting these words yields "Larger than a violin smaller than a bass my human-like range sings with grace" and the answer to the riddle is "CELLO".

Charity Break

Upon completing midterm, the page would refresh and a message would appear asking the Hunter to donate to charity along with a submission box.

After sending proof of donation to vthuntoverseer@gmail.com, the Hunter would receive an email telling them the answer is "FIDELITY". Upon entering the answer, the next poem would become visible on the puzzles page as long as the rest of the puzzles in the stage were completed.

1896-1944 Poem

Coming back to the main puzzles page, Hunters were greeted with a new riddle:

A poem for the seeker, a location lost in time
Click me on the map, here’s what you need to find:

If you listen very closely, even though ‘twas long before
You can still hear the echoes from my crowd and her roar

People would flock to see the turkeys play their marvelous game
They’d cheer, gobble, and chant their chants as the turkeys fought for fame

Alas, just as the game itself, my stands have given way
But since that time, I’ve been replaced, where domiciles lay

This poem referenced the now-demolished Miles stadium. Looking at old maps of VT campus placed the field somewhere between War Memorial Gymnasium and Lee Hall, and clicking generously anywhere in that range gave Hunters the next three puzzles

Trails

The eighth puzzle to appear in the timeline was from 1905:

Reading the caption, hunters needed to recognize that this was an overhead map of the Huckleberry Trail, a trail built over an old railroad spanning from Christiansburg to Blacksburg and beyond. After recognizing this, each of the symbols correlated to a specific building as shown by its outline: as ordered on the bottom, the buildings were German Club, Lane Stadium, Burrows-Burleson Tennis Center, German Club again, Advanced Propulsion and Power Lab, LewisGale Montgomery Hospital, and Big D’s Bbq and Ribs (this one was not necessary to solve, and wasn’t given a building silhouette since it’s a private residence). All these could be found on Google Maps, and using the name given Hunters had to extract the fourth letter from its title, based on "getting on at the fourth stop" from the caption. Doing this for every building and arranging them as shown on the bottom gave the answer "MERMAID"

Influenza

The ninth puzzle to appear in the timeline was from 1918:

The page shows crease lines from how it was originally folded. Noticing these, and trying to emulate the folds either physically or in photoshop, the black lines formed two distinctive words "BETWEEN" and "OUTPOSTS"
Recognizing those two words as appearing in the letter, the word that appears between them (and the answer to the puzzle) was "BUNKER"

Bells

Hunters first needed to notice that the first and capitalized letters in the phrase at the bottom spelled out SEMAPHORE, a type of flag code that uses the position of a person’s hands to indicate a letter. Then, after identifying all the times that bell chimes occur, Hunters needed to translate the hands on the clock to letters in semaphore. Doing so gave an order of P T E L N S A C C D I O O.

The bell chime at the beginning and end of the video served as a key for how to organize these letters. By matching the tones that chimed at each letter, the phrase spelled out was "CLOSED CAPTIONS." Finally, by looking at the closed captions on the video at the different time stamps, numbers 1-9 appeared during certain times. Ordering the same letters as previously found in this new order gave the final answer: "LOADSTONE"

1944-1990 Poem

Coming back to the main puzzles page, Hunters were greeted with a new riddle:

A poem for the seeker, a location bound in time
Click me on the map, here’s what you want to find:

At the top of every land, enthroned sits a king
For Whom treasures and tributes the Lordly court brings

And under the Lords in their castles on-high
A knight and his steel will often pass by

But who serves the knights their dinner of mutton
Where lent us their tables before we were shut-ins

This location was in Squires Hall, indicated by how medieval squires were servants to knights and hence the question of who serves the knights.

Bones

The eleventh puzzle to appear in the timeline was from 1948:

All the dominoes can be arranged with like faces touching. The number of pips on each domino corresponds to a letter (1=A, 2=B, 3=C, etc).

Adders Multiplying

The twelfth puzzle to appear in the timeline was from 1965:

Like all good lovers, they start with the head.

Though at first glance the snakes seem haphazardly arranged, there’s one key regularity. Wherever snakes cross, they cross perpendicular to each other, with the snakes either vertical and horizontal or 45 degrees rotated. The crossings all indicate either addition or multiplication signs, and each snake is an equation.

To read off the math, Hunters had to start with the head. Every snake has a different number of stripes near its head, giving both the order of the snakes and their values in the math. A snake’s number sentence also started with the number by its head. Then, starting with the head and reading towards the tail, every crossing added an operation and another integer to the equation, which could then be evaluated, order of operations considered.

An example for snake zero is shown below.
In order, the six snakes gave 12, 5, 13, 15, 14, and 19, which, mapping A to 1 and Z to 26, translates to "LEMONS", the final answer.

Iron Key

The thirteenth puzzle to appear in the timeline was from 1974:

The blade of the key is the same shape as the Periodic Table of Elements. Overlaying the Periodic Table shows that each word sits on a specific element: Hum on Hydrogen, Born on Copper, Gray on Phosphorus, etc. The flavor text gives I-T-E-I-T-E as the first letters of each word in sequence. -ITE is the suffix of the vast majority of minerals. Adding -ite to the end of all of the words on the key gives minerals: Humite, Bornite, Grayite, etc. The flavor text also gives the helpful information "...indicative, tinged electromagnetic...indicating their emplacement." The colors of each word show which part of each mineral’s chemical formula is represented by the element the word sits on. The colors follow the electromagnetic spectrum (ROYGBIV) with red being first, green being exactly in the center, and violet being last. Humite is violet and sits on Hydrogen- its formula ends in Hydrogen:

Humite = (Mg,Fe2+)7(SiO4)3(F,OH)2

Bornite is red and sits on Copper- its formula begins with Copper:

Bornite = Cu5FeS4

Grayite is green and sits on Phosphorus- Phosphorus is the exact middle element:

Grayite = (Th,Pb,Ca)(PO4) * H2O

Once the pattern is understood, the six words on the bow of the key can be decoded. All of these words are also present on the blade, but they are different colors. Hunters must look up each of these six minerals and choose the element specified by the color. If done correctly this gives:

The final answer is "LITEHOUSE." If Hunters took this and corrected it to "LIGHTHOUSE" they were given a response referencing spelling.

Some highly observant hunters may have noticed that the url for the previous puzzle was www.vthunt.com/puzzles/12 and this puzzle's url was www.vthunt.com/puzzles/14. If they inspected the page they may have also noticed a timeline node that was commented out in the html for the page that corresponds to "puzzle 13." If these curious hunters had gone to www.vthunt.com/puzzles/13 they would have been redirected to this link and a counter attached to their account would have incremented.

Routes

The fourteenth puzzle to appear in the timeline was from 1983:

The first step was to trace out the picture using lines from the highlighted nodes:
Doing so spelled out "BT STOP #S 1103 1123 1215 1324 1600," which hunters then needed to find on the below map. When clicked on, the bus stop displayed one of the 5 appropriate pictures with a bus as the stop:
Looking at the tickers, 5 strings appeared out of the ordinary. Taking them off the bus and comparing them side-by-side, parts of the strings matched each other, though not 1 to 1. Aligning the symbols to match each other as best as possible resulted in:
This could then be flattened by using only the overlapping letters (“S” went over all the “?” in that column), resulting in “RegularFourSidedShape”, which then led to the final answer of SQUARE.

1990-2020 Poem

Coming back to the main puzzles page, Hunters were greeted with a new riddle:

A poem for the seeker, a location made anew
Click me on the map, you’ll need me to get through:

‘Twixt arches of gold and tops of stairs
Your skill should sit displayed

Welcome to our final act
Along the promenade

Bravo, Bravo! Quite well you’ve played your part.
But to see the end of this fair play, you’ll need special art

This was in reference to Moss Arts Center, the performance hall located just next to Torgerson Bridge. Two geographic hints were the “arches of gold” (McDonalds) and “tops of stairs” (TOTS): a line between these two points intersects Moss Arts Center, which sits directly on Alumni Mall (a promenade, of sorts). Clicking on this location opened the last five visible puzzles

Graphical

The Fifteenth puzzle to appear in the timeline was from 1993:

Follow standard Picross rules to fill out the grid according to the colored numbers. The resulting image shows six nautical flags and translating each flag to its corresponding letter gives the answer "ORCHID"

Mining

The sixteenth puzzle to appear in the timeline was from 1999:

The flavor text hints at different font names, with the final instruction referencing wingdings. In the block below, the coherent writing matches wingdings text letter by letter. For example, "RAIN" corresponded to a raindrop, wingdings for S, and "LEFTIST APPROVINGS" translated to a finger pointing left and a thumbs up, wingdings for EC. Fully translated, the wingdings spell "START ABOVE XS FOLLOW DIRECTIONS & LOOK ABOVE ENDPO-INTS."
Hunters needed to find all of the instances of the letter X and look to the letter above it. These letters were all E, F or G, which in wingdings are hands pointing left, right or up respectively. The next letter in the direction indicated was another direction in wingdings. These paths could all be followed hitting only E, F, G, and H, hands pointing in the four directions, until reaching an I, translating in wingdings to a hand making a stop gesture. The paths and a detailed example are shown below.

As in the instructions, taking the letter above each I gave the answer "FLAMMABLE"

Digits

The seventeenth puzzle to appear in the timeline was from 2004:

The operators are indicating boolean algebra as opposed to arithmetic. ‘+’ and ‘x’ are commonly used to refer to OR and AND, respectively, and indicate the same here. The negative sign is used in place of NOT with minus being OR NOT. Following order of operations (multiply before adding) and treating each of the same segments separately gives a series of boolean expressions.
Example:
All the top segments on the second row become: (¬1 AND 1) OR (0 AND 1) = 0

Solving all the expressions gives the following word as displayed on a seven segment display:

Transit

The eighteenth puzzle to appear in the timeline was from 2013:

A city must be untangled to be understood.

As the hint and graphic suggest, the first step in solving this puzzle was to untangle the map, treating loops as flexible string. Doing that gave something like this:
This looks a lot like the Olympics logo, which makes the right orientation clear. Each word, it turns out, maps to one Olympic sport; the hard ones all turn up with a good google search. Using the official Olympic names, the sports are as follows:
The first letter of each sport, when read in ring order with the major-stop dot before the minor-stop dot, spells "TARDIGRADE"

Friend Request

The nineteenth puzzle to appear in the timeline was from 2020:

"In stories, we trace our history and memories - the paths through life resolving in a glorious final note." - @vt.hunt, Instagram/Facebook, 2020

The text and image point to looking at stories on the official VTHunt Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat. Videos on the stories should be traced as a path and still images are represented as dots on a map. Tracing all videos and pictures on a map yields:
The resulting notes are BAGABB which is the melody to "Mary Had A Little Lamb" but the final note is missing. The final note references the lyric and answer "LAMB"

2020 Poem

Coming back to the main puzzles page, Hunters were greeted with a new riddle:

A poem for the seeker seeking something that will bind
all their journey into one. Now it is me that you must find.

Fifteen Celsius sounds colder, though; I look up, think of home
East wind running through my field, a vast but fine-toothed comb

Ignoring the first couplet, the first words from each line pointed to global coordinates, Sixty North Fifteen East. These coordinates were in Sweden, the last known location of Rekam from the 2019 VTHunt, in a field, matching the story in the final journal entry. Clicking there unlocked the final puzzle of the Hunt.

Final Puzzle

Part 1

After completing the 2020 riddle, a starmap and a new submission box were revealed after the 2020 node:

Every Rekam had their own types of blemishes, imperfections and irregularities that burn starkly against the backdrop of their successes. Seek them out, and look to your victories so far to organize what you find.

Each journal page contains several different types of mistakes. 1825 has bolded letters, smudged letters, and ink stains; 1896 has italics, bolded letters, and font changes; 1919 has italics, small cases, and lowercase; 1944 has misaligned letters, font change, and stray marks; 2020 has font change, italics, and inkstains. The pattern of each of the error types on each page corresponds with a different constellation. Lining the constellation up with the errors and starting at the largest star and tracing along the thicker path gives a set of letters. Additionally, the names of half of the constellations references an answer from a previous puzzle; ordering the constellations in the chronological order of the puzzles gives the final clue.

And the 'final' answer is:
yoeeoaeaeaieoueaeeaeeuoiaeeioouoeeeaueaeeeaaeaaooeuiayeaeyaaaoayaaiaeaueyeaie

Part 2

After entering the string of vowels, the following text appeared:

Apologies my dear hunter, but I must ask you to complete one more little task. It’s trivial, really, just a simple puzzle. Answer me this: What is my name? Easy, I know; truly a menial task. Especially seeing as we’re already acquainted.

The grad student who gave you access to the hunt and released hints throughout the event has a suspicious level of access to Hunt resources and seems to know more than he’s letting on. CONNECTING THESE DOTS, you should arrive at the conclusion that he is the real mastermind behind the VT Hunt.

Inputting the grad student’s name, "BENN SIMON," completes the hunt.

Congratulations to all the winners of the 2020 VT Hunt!

This year we raised over $5,700 dollars in donations to various charities! Thank you so much to everyone who donated!

We had a total of 782 teams with 2135 total participants.

Of these 782 teams, 32 completed the Hunt, garnering a total of 125 Victors.

The medal-finishers of the hunt were the teams WhippleThis, dawsondo, and puzzlersclub.

We'd like to give a special shoutout to team OlyFriendFam, who had the most answer submits (at 740!) - congrats on a victory well-earned.

We'd also like to give a special shoutout to RollCanes for getting Rick Rolled 69 times! Nice!

At the end of the hunt, here's how many teams were stuck on each stage: